Small rooms, big dreams: inside the fantastical interiors of Udmurtia

In Summer 2010 photographer Lucia Ganieva travelled through the villages of central Russia to create a photographic project on the Udmurts, an indigenous people with their own culture and language based in Udmurtia, in the Urals. Ganieva was invited by locals into their homes, and that's where she found her subject: kitchens, bedrooms and living rooms covered with photo-printed wallpaper depicting fantastically lush, Edenic scenes. "In decorating the walls of their homes with photographic wallpaper, they found a way to materialise their dreams of far away and exotic places, places they will never be able to visit but in their dreams," says Ganieva. By capturing those interiors, and without taking a single portrait, Ganieva managed to create an intimate study of a people living between Asia and Europe, history and modernity, reality and dream.